Why Trump Loves Arizona

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President Trump during a rally in Phoenix on Tuesday.CreditTom Brenner/The New York Times

By Tom Zoellner

Aug. 23, 2017

When President Trump sought solace from arguably the most disastrous week of his presidency, he headed toward Arizona — and seemed to have a grand old time. His speech Tuesday in Phoenix was classic Trump: He lambasted the “very dishonest media,” for almost a half hour; he relitigated his Charlottesville responses in petulant detail; he defended Confederate statues as “our history and our heritage.” And, just for fun, he dangled a possible pardon for Joe Arpaio, the hometown authoritarian former sheriff who was convicted of criminal contempt in July.

What better venue for Mr. Trump, praised just the night before as presidential during his Afghanistan speech, to revert to his natural form? Arizona, after all, is the state that effectively made him president, and not merely for the 11 electoral votes it awarded him last November.

The 45th president’s journey from a stunt candidate to a serious force began in Phoenix, on July 11, 2015, less than a month after his escalator-ride announcement in which he spontaneously excoriated Mexican immigrants as “rapists.” His tiny staff found themselves overwhelmed with ticket requests for a rally at a Phoenix hotel and had to book the Phoenix Convention Center on short notice. Something was about to burst forth that nobody full understood at the time — perhaps not even Mr. Trump himself.

A few immigration activists showed up with banners, and were immediately set upon by an angry crowd of rally attendees who had just discovered that a loudmouth with a Queens accent was just the right person to shout their frustrations by proxy. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was one of the first rallies of his campaign to be broadcast live on cable. The rowdiness and near-gladiatorial atmosphere — along with the symbiotic and contradictory dynamic of media-bashing and media glare — made for ratings gold and would persist at Trump rallies through the campaign. But this strange recipe got its first taste-test in Phoenix.

He started his campaign polling in seventh place; after that 2015 appearance in Phoenix, he was in the lead. And the crowds were genuinely impressive: The convention center was packed to its capacity of 4,200, though Mr. Trump later exaggerated the number by a factor of three. He made reference to its size again on Tuesday night. “The crowds were so big, almost as big as tonight,” he marveled. “Believe me Arizona, I will never forget.”

Arizona had prepared Mr. Trump’s path in more spiritual ways that long predated that transformative 2015 rally. With an economy built on real-estate deals, and some outright land hustles, Arizona was primed to embrace an outsider promising quick miracles. Bashing Mexican immigrants has played well for at least 20 years with the state’s other significant base of immigrants: Anglo retirees with nest eggs and a leeriness of their new Latino neighbors. And the luxury resorts ringing metro Phoenix are models of gilded Trumpian tackiness.

Perhaps more importantly, Arizona has a distrust of political establishments and a lengthy history of electing tough-talking disappointments. Former governors Fife Symington and Evan Mecham left office in the midst of criminal proceedings. Last month, Mr. Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt for ordering his deputies to harass selected Latino drivers in their constant hunt for illegal immigrants. But the crowd at the rally seemed to think he was Gary Cooper. “I’ll make a prediction — I think he is going to be just fine,” Mr. Trump said to cheers.

It makes sense. Mr. Arpaio was basically Mr. Trump with a badge: a blunt Northeasterner (Mr. Arpaio is from Springfield, Mass.) with a taste for fame who was able to sniff out the raw nativist sentiment in his electorate and position himself as a refreshing alternative to the more mealy-mouthed establishment politicians. He privately courted journalists even as he trashed them in public. And he made outlandish sales pitches with no shame.

After his retirement from the Drug Enforcement Agency, Mr. Arpaio and his wife owned a Scottsdale, Ariz., travel agency that sold tickets on a spaceship which he said would make a maiden trip on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage of discovery. He managed to sell 19 tickets; the rocket was never built. Instead, Mr. Arpaio got himself elected sheriff in 1992 and built Tent City, the infamous penal village in the desert where inmates sweltered in the heat for the sake of world media attention.

Mr. Trump has already a similar penchant for stunt, but his recent choice of mood-booster — ranting in front of Phoenix crowds — might be the strangest thing of all. Theodore Roosevelt went to the woods to shoot large animals. Bill Clinton liked action movies. Richard Nixon sought lofty words in stone when he ordered his valet to take him to the Lincoln Memorial at 4 a.m. after the 1970 killings at Kent State. And at this fragile moment in his presidency, Mr. Trump chose the format of the mega-rally and the vendetta-filled rant for personal inspiration.

Arizona has a reputation of being the “choke” state for presidential candidates, fielding a strong team of seekers who didn’t quite make it over the top: Barry Goldwater, Morris Udall, Bruce Babbitt, John McCain. But Arizona can now make a rightful claim to being the effective home state of the 45th president of the United States — a place where his ideas and style had been accepted before he ever came along.

Tom Zoellner, a fifth-generation Arizonan, is the politics editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.